Nadine Zahreddine
AP Psychology
Brave New World Essay
10/6/15
In Brave New World, in order to form a utopian society the people must achieve their prime goals of “Community, Identity, Stability.” Community was achieved by encouraging people to live in solidarity. Identity was achieved by dividing the society into different castes and teaching them to conform; those who felt more than a minimum of individuality would be considered outcasts. Finally, the desire for stability: to achieve this, there must be a loss of individuality and the undoing of Mother Nature- minimizing risk and change. By successfully engineering these particular conditions, it produces a world where people finally live their “happily ever after,” however at a great
…show more content…
Emotions are personal, intimate feelings that influence us to act on our beliefs or dreams. They persuade us to become better people and to grow, learn, and love. For this reason the government in Brave New World discourages these intensified characteristics. They believe that happiness creates control and stability. They try their best to eliminate all painful emotions, meaning all passion is gone.
Once individuality and emotion were completely eliminated, dehumanization enters as personal expression. Individual expression was never important because the people don’t have the ability to express their emotions. “But that’s the price you have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art" the leaders would say (Huxley, 189). The only way the people in Brave New World see the purpose of life is through maintenance of well
…show more content…
A few examples include hypnopaedia, tyranny of happiness, drugging the commonality, and fashion for euthanasia. In Brave New World, hypnopaedia was used to brainwash the people to accept promiscuity and use and abuse Soma. It’s a form of subliminal reinforcement where slogans were played while an individual slept. Once awake the individuals would behave exactly the way their controllers wanted them to behave. Today in our society, we are blasted with information on TV and social media that make us wonder if what we hear is true or false. Not everything we hear is true, but sometimes we are brainwashed by these falsifications to think a certain
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, truth and happiness are falsely engineered to create a perfect society; the belief of the World Controllers that stability is the the key to a utopian society actually led to the creation of an anti-utopian society in which loose morals and artificial happiness exist. Huxley uses symbolism, metaphors, and imagery to satirize the possibiliy of an artificial society in the future as well as the “brave new world” itself.
In the book Brave New World Aldous Huxley creates a society in which brainwashing is the new improvement to society, however we also see this in our society today. He shows this through the genetic process of conception in the labs, the development of children in the society, and the drugs that subdue the abilities of the adult mind. In a society centered around the “motto, community, identity, stability”(Huxley 3), the only possible way to attain this is through genetic adaptation.
middle of paper ... ... In the Brave New World, society aims to preserve the homologous nature of living. With strict rules, crowd mentality and community actives, the Brave New World attempts to get rid of the individual. Hypnopedia messages such as "When the individual feels, the community reels," and "Everybody belongs to everyone else," the Brave New World attempts to diminish the value of individuality and seeks instead to promote the idea of society first.
This is by our current standards in 2014 what many may consider a dystopian society. But for most people who actually live there it is considered more of a Utopian society. Or at least the leaders, creators, ruling bodies of the society attempt to present it as so. Although many of the citizens of Brave New World’s society seem happy, it is only due to their ignoran...
Utopian societies are often thought to be impractical based upon the human idea that no one person or thing can ever be completely perfect. Because this idea of perfection is practically impossible to achieve, various controlled techniques need to be used in order to create a utopia. Aldous Huxley states in his foreword to Brave New World that the creation of a perfect utopia is quite possible if we as humans “refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens” in attempts at creating social stability (xiv). Huxley’s Brave New World “depicts a World State where there is absolute social stability made possible by government-controlled research in biology and psychology” (Woiak 4). While the existence of this utopian
In order to create structure in a society, one must ensure the care of its people. In the imaginary civilization of Utopia, the main strategy is to "get through life as comfortably and cheerfully as we can, and help other members of our species to do so too" (More 92). More focuses on the well being of its citizens to create happiness and order within the society. He does this by initiating the idea of human rights and equality. With the sense of equality in society people can help each other to live blissfully, and stop trying to become better than their neighbors.
This serene society greatly contradicts the one we live in. Our society is furnished with hatred and warfare, yet in return, we are given freedom and the privilege of having distinctive characters. Given the nature of human beings, our society is more idealistic to live in. Utopia is an imaginary state, which consists of people who believe they are more capable of living in a group than alone. In such a community, the welfare of the group is the primary interest compared to the comfort of individuals.
Brave New World is a novel about a dystopian society named “The World State” set in A.F. 632 (632 years after Henry Ford’s death). In this society, advanced technology is used to mass produce people and condition them into only wanting and doing certain things, creating a caste system. However, doing so takes away people’s freedom to think for one’s self. Certain people are able to step back from the monotony of this society and because of this, they feel detached. This scenario adds an element of alienation, this scenario poses a question, is it better to be happy or individualistic?
Humanity is the qualities or characteristics that, considered as a whole, to be characteristic of human beings. Qualities like love, marriage, commitment, and family. One of Huxley’s characters, John, tries to point out these characteristics to Helmholtz, a man who has been taught the beliefs of the World State, but utterly fails. Helmholtz only laughs at the ’ridiculous’ ideas of love, marriage, and parents as John recites a serious passage from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to him (Huxley 184-187). Helmholtz finds humor in these new ideas that he has never learned about before. This obliviousness to traits that make people human is the attitude of the whole society in Brave New World, and because of this viewpoint, leaders of the World State have no moral regret manufacturing humans their number one priority.
Imagine living in a society where there is no sense of independence, individual thought, or freedom. A society where the government uses disturbing methods that dehumanize people in order to force conformity upon them. Taking away any sense of emotion, it would be very undesirable to live in a society with such oppression. Such society is portrayed in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. The World State uses social restrictions to create permanent artificial personalities for people within the society.
“A human soul is always a mystery”. (Unknown) The soul is a mysterious part that sets humans apart from one another. By coercing individuals to conform to particular ideologies,society poses a peril to one’s individuality. The only way for a person to keep their individuality is to preserve their soul. Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, depicts a dystopian universe wherein each person’s individuality is eradicated through conditioning and arrangement into castes. Among these individuals, Huxley presents his audience with characters who experience a glimmer of a soul. Characters in Brave New World, though conditioned to particular mannerisms, retain their identity by exhibiting a glimmer of a soul.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates a colorful, fantastic universe of sex and emotion, programming and fascism that has a powerful draw in a happy handicap. This reality pause button is called “Soma”. “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.” ( Huxley 54 ).
Our fascination with utopias stems from our attraction to and pursuit of progress within our own society. We study utopias with the hope that our society will someday evolve into one. But what often goes unnoticed is that if our society improves enough to become utopian, it won't be able to improve any longer. Hence, it will be rigid and unchanging, the complete opposite of what it was as it evolved to its elevated state. This is an awful truth for us because we place value and virtue in the ideas of desire and progress. Our reason tells us: once in an ideal land, desire cannot simply cease to be, because desire is part of our human nature. And our reason is right. An ideal society should accentuate our human nature, not suppress it. As we desire a perfect society we know that a perfect could not exist without our desire. And as long as we desire, we hope for progress. The idea that an utopia wouldn't allow such progress to occur is enough to make us stop believing in utop...
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.
This is a very scary society because everything is being controlled even before someone is born, in test tube, where they determine which class they are going to fall under, how they are going to look like and beyond. Therefore, the society of Brave New World is being controlled by society from the very start by using technology which affects how the people behave in this inhumane, unrealistic, society. The people in this community act like they do not have any emotions or feelings at all. This is because from the very start, they were structured in such a way that they could not feel if something is sad or if something is happy. The only thing that they are allowed to enjoy is soma.